I Explored China’s Biggest Ghost City And It’s Even Crazier Than People Think

Built for over a million people, the city of Ordos was designed
to be the crowning glory of Inner Mongolia. Doomed to
incompletion however, this futuristic metropolis now rises empty
out of the deserts of northern China. Only 2% of its buildings
were ever filled; the rest has largely been left to decay,
abandoned mid-construction, earning Ordos the title of
China's Ghost City.

Last year I travelled to Inner Mongolia for myself, to get a
closer look at the bizarre, ghost metropolis of
Ordos... and the experience, as I would
discover, was far stranger than anything I could have prepared
for.

The Ghost Town of Inner Mongolia

China's property market is in a strange place.

With a population reckoned at 1,351,000,000 and rising fast, the
resultant boom in property development has led to scores of
new-made millionaires and a rapidly growing elite class; at the
same time however, analysts fear that this property bubble is
set to burst. The country
itself owes coming on for a trillion dollars in debt.

Meanwhile, a billion people are waking up to the possibilities of
fast cars, smartphones, broadband Internet and credit cards.

Some of China's most rapidly developing cities are virtually
unheard of in the West; but for every overnight economic success
story, there seems to be a hidden swathe of near misses, dead
ends and bankruptcies. Out of all these phantoms however, nothing
compares to the strangeness of China's 'Ghost City': Ordos.

The city of Ordos is a heavily stylised population centre located
close to the Ordos Desert, and it's one of the main cities of
Inner Mongolia. This area is famed for its rapidly expanding
population and developing urban areas – the region of Inner
Mongolia boasting a higher GDP than
even Beijing itself.

Inner Mongolia is an interesting place. Once the birthplace of
Genghis Khan, only 79% of the population belong to China's
predominant Han ethnicity, while 17% are of Mongol origin. It was
once a part of Greater Mongolia, though consecutive Chinese
empires and the latter-day rise of the Communist Party saw Inner
Mongolia moulded and cast, time and time again, as a subservient
province of China.

Interestingly however, Inner Mongolia is one of the only places
in the world that still uses traditional Mongolian script. While
Mongolia itself adopted Cyrillic during the communist years,
perhaps the Mongols of China felt they had more to prove;
clinging fiercely on to their heritage, and with it, the ancient
characters that still now appear on street signs across Ordos and
Kangbashi.

When a conglomeration of property developers began planning a new
urban centre just outside the existing city of Ordos in 2003, the
Kangbashi New Area, Ordos seemed set to become the futuristic
jewel in China's crown of city states.

However, nobody quite anticipated how quickly this new
development would fall flat on its face. Deadlines weren't met,
loans went unpaid, and investors pulled out before projects could
be completed – leaving entire streets of unfinished buildings.
The ridiculous cost of accommodation in this dream city put off
many would-be inhabitants, so that even fully completed
apartments became difficult to sell.

According to one local taxi driver I spoke to, many of those who
did make the move to Kangbashi were already abandoning their
homes – and breaking out of the ghost town.

While some developers still labour on with their thankless
construction projects, others are busy slashing prices. Typical
housing prices in Kangbashi have fallen from $1,100 to $470 per
square foot, over the last five years alone.

Nowadays the Kangbashi district, planned to accommodate a
population in excess of one million, is home to a lonely 20,000
people – leaving 98% of this 355-square kilometre site either
under construction or abandoned altogether.

A November 2009 report on AlJazeera exposed
the city of Ordos to a worldwide audience, and the story was run
the next year by Time Magazine. Pretty soon,
Ordos had earned the accolade of 'China's Ghost City'.

Journalists and photographers representing a number of
world-renowned publications have since been to capture
Kangbashi's empty streets, its row upon row of apartment blocks
abandoned mid-construction.

However, none of these reports seemed to venture far from the
city centre and its adjoining streets; resulting in broad,
post-apocalyptic cityscapes that left much to the imagination.
The more I read about Ordos, the more I wanted to know what lay
beyond these hastily fitted doors and windows; to actually see
inside, and under the skin of a city that never came to be.

Last year, my dream became a reality. I teamed up with Gareth
from Young Pioneer Tours – a man just about crazy
enough to share my fascination for this otherworldly ghost
metropolis – and together we started planning our journey into
Inner Mongolia.

Arrival in Ordos

The city of Ordos is served by the newly-built Eerduosi Airport.
From the moment we got off our plane, it was apparent that
someone, sometime, had made grand plans for this city.

The futuristically sculpted terminal building is decked out with
fountains and hanging baskets, chic coffee shops and sub-lit
escalators glowing in shades of green and blue.

While the population of Ordos is now just 10% Mongolian to 90%
Chinese, nevertheless the airport was resplendent with proud
icons of a Mongolian heritage; effigies of horses and minstrels
gaze down across the central concourse, while the departure hall
features a vast mural, a ring of painted scenes depicting the
life of Genghis Khan.

We took the second of two daily flights from Beijing to Eerduosi;
departing from the smaller, former military airfield in the
suburbs of the capital. It brought us to Inner Mongolia after
dark, and we hopped onto the transfer coach headed towards Ordos
city centre.

We were on this luxurious coach for around half an hour,
enthroned in soft reclining seats replete with cup holders, leg
rests and a movie channel... all the while, half-seen hulks of
concrete and metal sped past our windows, distant, shadowy shapes
appearing and disappearing out of the gloom.

I felt hemmed in on all sides by invisible construction sites. It
was hard to make out much of our surroundings, given the bright
interior lighting on the coach. On the final stretch into Ordos
however, we passed by the shell of a stadium-to-be; the vast,
skeletal seating areas rose up in a ring around a central playing
field, lit by industrial spotlights and the regular, telltale
flares of several hundred welding guns.

We arrived in Ordos sometime in the early hours of the morning,
checked our bags into a hotel, and grabbed a beer for the road.
The city centre is not a long way off completion: it has shops
and apartments, cafés, bars and restaurants. For all this seeming
normality however, downtown Ordos is presided over by a series of
doom-struck towers, grey office buildings, flats and shopping
malls – and most of them are completely empty.

We walked for a few hours, past restaurants, bars, casinos and
sex shops. The lights were shining bright in every establishment,
but the people were nowhere to be seen. Cutting through one
backstreet, we passed the pink lights of a brothel. The shop
front was lined in wide, glass windows, to expose a troupe of
young girls stood as if on parade in a wardrobe of matching
lingerie. These dozen-or-so prostitutes numbered more than any
pedestrians we'd managed to count all evening.

Everywhere, there seemed to be a show of readiness; of
establishments with their doors thrown wide open, not just to
welcome guests but also, perhaps, to prove a point. To show this
city for the functional, hospitable destination that it so
desperately wants to be.

We tried to get something to eat at a backstreet restaurant,
approaching the doorway where local kids were fighting with a
water hose.

"Do you have food?" we asked.

"Come in, come in," they said, gesturing at a dimly lit booth
within, at the fridge beside it stocked with cold noodles and
soft drinks. There was no sign of an adult on the premises, no
sight nor smell of a chef at work. As with so much else in Ordos,
the lights were on but nobody was home.

By the time we got back to our hotel, to its luxuriously
oversized beds and in-room bars that featured whisky, peanuts and
gas masks, we were still struggling to get to grips with this
place, to make sense of the city.

Through and through it felt like a construction site: a builders'
canteen stretched to accommodate a full city. For working men,
there were primal comforts aplenty – bars, snacks and brothels –
but while the fine restaurants and casinos made a show of being
ready for tourists, delegates, or better still, investors, most
of them were no more than empty fronts and meaningless displays.

By the light of the following morning, we got our first
impression of the sheer scale of abandonment. We stopped off for
a fast-food breakfast, the restaurant cowering in the shadow of
the city's CBD. In place of industrious office buildings however,
a series of hollow fingers rose up to the sky; the shells of
would-be towers, one after another, row after row, vanishing off
into the distance.

Immediately above us towered what could have been the
headquarters of a bank – forty floors of office space, wrapped in
a shell of mirrored panels. In its un-maintained state however,
these reflective scales were falling away in great swathes, to
expose the bare concrete beneath. Not even finished yet, and
already it needed a makeover.

We found a mosque near the city centre, a modern, cubist
structure formed out of clean, white blocks. On closer
inspection, it appeared as though the temple had never yet been
used; peering through the glass doors we saw nothing inside but
open space, while the doors themselves were still wrapped in
plastic - as though fresh out of a warehouse somewhere, and
hastily assembled.

Before proceeding to our main destination, we decided to get a
better look around this, the older, more densely populated centre
of Ordos.

We found an amiable taxi driver, who was more than happy to take
us past some of the city's main sights. He drove us down a long
boulevard, lined with ornate lamps crafted into 1930s-style art
deco figurines; past an overgrown park, and row upon row of
concrete shells. Eventually we came to a halt, before a grand
statue of a horse set into the middle of a roundabout.

"Ordos," the statue's inscription proclaimed, to nobody in
particular, "The Outstanding Tourism City of China."

It was almost too much to process... but as it would turn out, so
far we had only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. Nothing could
have quite prepared us for the unadulterated strangeness of the
Kangbashi district.

The Kangbashi New Area

The new residential zone of Kangbashi was built on the north bank
of the Wulan Mulun River, where its spacious layout, innovative
monuments and striking, sculpted skyscrapers look every part the
21st century metropolis; or they would have, that is, if anybody
had been living in them.

"They will come," our taxi driver kept insisting, on the drive
over from the old heart of Ordos. "You don't think our city is
beautiful? You'll see. The people will come."

His confidence was to be paraphrased by almost every local that
we spoke to on that trip; a blind assurance that these beautiful
buildings couldn't stay empty forever. It was inconceivable that
all of this hard work might have been for nothing.

We drove back along the freeway, which links old Ordos to
Kangbashi, before continuing northeast towards the airport at
Dongsheng. On the way we passed by the stadium again, less
dramatic by the light of day, while beyond that a forest of
dusty, unfinished towers fanned out from either side of the road.
Cranes stood sentry over some of these construction sites, many
of them rising as much as forty, fifty stories high above the
desert. In contrast, the road itself was smooth and well
maintained; its shoulders and central reservation decorated with
well-watered shrubs, and artistic horse motifs.

The taxi dropped us off at the top end of Genghis Khan Square,
from where we gazed out across the desolation of Kangbashi.
Around us rose the figures of khans and their royal advisors, of
men, women and horses dressed in traditional Mongolian finery.

Roughly 600 feet to the south, at the heart of a wide, open
courtyard reared up two colossal horses, perhaps the most iconic
of Kangbashi's monuments. Beyond the horses, this vast central
plaza fed into a park, dusty sand in place of grass and with
paths that fanned out to form the shape of a sunburst.

Residential and corporate towers rose up in all directions – a
satisfyingly symmetrical alignment of blocks and skyscrapers –
while before that, hemming us in, Kangbashi's most notable works
of architecture lined the paths of Genghis Khan Square. Along the
left hand side, past the two rearing horses sat the Kangbashi
Theatre: a curious building, its shape supposedly inspired by a
traditional form of Mongolian headwear.

To our right, the library building resembled a cluster of leaning
books while beside it, the Ordos Museum sat like... well, it's
hard to say exactly. Mad Architects, the aptly-named firm
behind the project, have suggested that the design reflects, "the
crossroads faced by the surrounding community which is striving
to interpret their local traditions within the newly constructed
urban context."

Make of that what you will.

The square around us was not completely empty. A man watched
nearby, as his son flew a kite; the bright sail drifting high
above the heads of the noble khans. There was very little traffic
about, but the occasional car or bike would cruise past us now
and again, none of them seeming to be in any particular hurry.

There was a steady trickle of people moving in and out of the
Ordos Museum, and we spied a few more stood around the horses'
hooves; though as we drew closer, we'd notice these were dressed
in the drab uniforms of street sweepers. Over the course of the
day, we'd find that maintenance teams in Kangbashi outnumbered
pedestrians tenfold.

Ambling around the paths that lined the city centre, we passed
small speakers mounted on stems, which blasted out Mongolian folk
music to no one in particular. Further down the plaza, past the
horses and the theatre, printed signs advertised a café and we
decided to have a look inside. We took the elevator up to the top
floor, where the doors opened to reveal a gaggle of giggling,
school-age girls stood in a line to greet us. It looked much the
same as the brothel we'd passed the night before, save that this
time the girls were fully dressed.

A wave of surprise and curiosity rippled through the staff when
two foreigners stepped out of the lift. We were shown to a window
seat, from where we looked down across the vast expanse of
Genghis Khan Square. Kangbashi, without a doubt, was the
strangest city I'd ever seen.

We had a coffee, then a beer, as we chatted excitedly about the
empty streets, the bizarre monuments beneath us. This was
everything we'd seen from the photographs, a surreal, desolate
metropolis; ancient Mongolia spliced with scenes from the distant
future, set against the swirling sands of the Mu Us Desert. Up
until this point though, we'd only seen the city from the
streets, from its roads and pedestrian paths ... It was time to
go deeper. We finished our drinks, and set off to do some proper
exploring.

It was time to see the real Ordos – to see
what the BBC, Al Jazeera, the New York Times et al., had, in my
opinion, failed to show. It was time to get off the approved
footpaths, to start opening some doors and ignoring no
entry signs, as we attempted to infiltrate the world's
largest ghost town.

To the Rooftops of Ordos

From Genghis Khan Square we turned east, crossing a patch of
scrubland that I can only guess had been intended to some day
burst into green grass. Soon a long, square building rose up to
our right, decorated with complex ridges and textured beams along
its hull. We figured it for a supermarket – though from the
outside there were few clues as to what the building might
contain... if it even contained anything.

Along this main road, a steady trickle of vehicles passed us on
their way towards Dongsheng and its airport in the east. We
needed to get away from the cars though, get out into the forest
of unfinished towers, the shells of apartment buildings that rose
out of the sand like dead trees in a drought.

Turning away from the road, weaving this way and that onto the
smaller, narrower backstreets, we found our way into a
residential estate. The buildings were linked here by a series of
winding footpaths, the roads diverted around the block to leave a
pedestrianised space at its heart. Paving stones formed a track
through the shifting sand, looping from one building to the next
amidst towering stacks of plastic-wrapped outdoor furniture;
unassembled amenities piled in every corner, as if freshly tipped
from the back of a lorry.

Turning the corner into a courtyard between tall, concrete
towers, we passed a capsized statue: a modern, stylised figure of
a mother and child, lain forgotten behind a stack of building
materials.

It was clear how the small square had been envisaged, as
comfortable, high-rise apartments facing in towards a communal
garden area. Perhaps it would have featured flowers, fountains
and benches when complete – perhaps it still will, some day.
Impossible to tell.

Here and there between the buildings, the occasional
glass-panelled box rose up out of the ground; each one of them
featuring an elevator shaft or a flight of stairs heading
downwards. Soon enough we found a lift shaft with a broken glass
panel at the rear, and, squeezing through the gap we made our way
swiftly down into the bowels of Kangbashi.

Beneath the street plan, a whole lower level of the city seemed
to have been set aside for parking. It made sense, keeping the
cars away from these residential zones by redirecting traffic
underground instead. More and more we'd see just how much thought
and planning had gone into the Kangbashi New Area.

The lights came on as we entered, and the long, wide tunnel ahead
shone in shades of silver and green. There were two, maybe three
parked cars in sight – and expensive looking ones at that.
Despite these few lonely residents however, the whole place still
had that freshly varnished look about it: not a footprint nor a
tyre mark in sight.

Here and there along the tunnels, between the series of
subterranean parking halls that fed one into another through a
network of identical bulkhead doors, we'd see elevators leading
back up towards the surface. I tried one – the lights fired up
immediately, and we rode a lift right up into the building above.

If you're imagining a carpeted, stainless steel elevator, perhaps
even fitted with a mirror, then you'd be wrong. This lift was
little more than a plywood cage, a terrifying, creaking box that
seemed to wobble as it rose... as if hoisted up by a rope slung
over the branch of a tree.

First we had a look around the ground floor of the building; bare
concrete for the most part, though all the lights came on at a
touch. In the corner of a corridor, a massive fuse box was set
into one raw, unplastered wall. I popped it open, the creaking
cover unlocked, to reveal a vast array of crude solder joins and
trailing, loose wires. I quickly snapped the lid closed again
with the back of my hand.

Then, plucking up the courage, I knocked on the door of an
apartment. No answer. I waited a while, knocked again, then
slowly turned the handle. The door opened freely, and we took a
look inside – at the dusty unfinished floors, the bare gypsum
walls that formed the basic foundations of what had the potential
to be a spacious family flat. In the largest room, beneath the
window, a children's table and chairs had been arranged, set with
plastic cups and bowls and chopsticks.

We tried a couple more homes – all of them the same – before
making our way up to the highest level. Stepping out of the lift
onto the 12th floor corridor, I found myself instinctively
tiptoeing... as if sneaking past the occupants of a normal, busy
building. Of course, the chances of anyone being home were next
to zero; but then, the cars parked down below had presumably
belonged to someone.

At the end of the corridor, around the corner, a flight of steps
went upwards to a simple wooden door. It seemed too large to fit
its frame, and so rather than being locked the exit was fastened
tight with wire; a long tangle of stiff cable had been twisted
around the door handle, looped about a stair rail and then tied
up into a sharp and prickly mess. It took a few minutes of
bending, twisting and bloody fingers before we were finally
stepping out onto the roof of the apartment building.

Up until this point we'd been sheltered; contemplating only one
empty street after another. From this height though, we finally
started to get a sense of scale. Row after row after row of
towers spread out around us, many of them no more than skeletons
attended by rusty cranes. I began to realise for the first time
quite how large this city was supposed to have been.

As good as the view was though, we were still shielded on all
sides by taller builders. What we saw of the cityscape – the
desert beyond – came to us in glimpses between the looming
concrete shapes pressed in on all sides. I wanted to get higher
still, to escape above the horizon and look down on the ghost
city as a whole.

The Mean Streets of Kangbashi

Heading back down to street level, we wandered for a while
through the estates. Residential towers rose up around a series
of consecutive dirt bowls, each one of them sown with the seeds
of utopia, each one of them a doomed and withered crop. Reaching
the end of the zone we hopped a fence and crossed the road; I
guess by now we were heading northeast.

We walked along a main street, hemmed in on all sides by shops,
apartment blocks, colourful school buildings and the vast bulk of
Kangbashi Hospital. The occasional car or bike hummed past, but
the pavements around us were empty save for the occasional crew
of street sweepers. Even now, it was hard to get one's head
around the idea that all of this was uninhabited.

On our right, we passed a police station. It met the typical
Chinese design: a square, officious building set back behind a
courtyard, a sentry box watching over the folding fence out
front. It seemed hard to believe that even this station was
unoccupied.

I didn't know which way to turn next, so consumed as I was with a
desire to explore everything. Marching headlong into the
police station seemed a leap too far, however... so we tried the
hospital instead.

It was impossible to tell whether the building had seen use, or
whether, like so much of the city, it had so far only welcomed
the boots of construction crews. We decided to put it to the
test.

Approaching the side of the hospital building we tried a small
door, found it open, and ducked beneath the curtain that hung
across within. Before us a narrow, grotty staircase led down
several levels under the ground. We strolled on in, beneath
electric lights that burned for no one, onwards and downwards to
who knew what.

We never did find out. A babble of shouted words tumbled down the
staircase behind us, hot from the mouth of an angry security
guard. We tried reasoning with him – "just a few photos, yeah?" –
but it clearly wasn't going to happen.

After being frogmarched back to the street by a man who could
have passed as a Triad tough-guy in any Hollywood thriller, we
crossed over the road, and made a beeline for our next target.

One of the signs on the building opposite said something about
solicitors, though this concrete shell fell a long way short of a
functioning office. The ground level was boarded up, but there
was a small hole punched through the thin wooden veneer - so I
ducked on through and slipped inside the building.

It was silent inside, a still, dusty space that could well have
grown into a shopping centre in time. This first room fed through
a doorway into a larger space beyond, and I swung around the
corner almost headlong into a work crew. In true Chinese style,
two men operated heavy tools while another five smoked and
watched them. One of them looked up, caught my eye: I smiled back
warmly, then backed out fast the way I had come.

By now we'd walked a fair distance from our last rooftop, and the
towers now surrounding us rose significantly higher than the last
batch – a good 20-or-so storeys. We decided to give it another go
and so we nipped across the forecourt of a bare, plastic-fronted
kindergarten, and into another residential estate.

There were roads between the buildings this time, a couple of
cars parked on corners and even one in motion; its occupants
eyeing us warily as they cruised on by. We made for one of the
closest towers before trying the door, finding it open, and
letting ourselves in.

This building was in a much better state than the last apartment
block. The walls were finished, and several doors were decorated
with the Chinese symbols for luck and fortune. We made straight
for the lift and rode it to the top.

Upstairs, an open door led into a lavish apartment hung with
chandeliers and textured wallpaper; an opulent penthouse suite.
There were sounds of activity inside and so we crept past
quickly, before taking the last flight of steps up to the roof.
The door opened at a push, and we stepped out into the sky.

This rooftop was smaller than the last – just a square, open
space, and a second door that opened onto the whirring, rusted
mechanism that powered the lift. If the view from the top of the
other block had been impressive though, this one was
spectacular.

Ordos fell away beneath us: a wide, sweeping wasteland of empty
towers and silent, disused streets. I tried looking out for signs
of motion, clues to life in the metropolis. The odd car moved
slowly along the main road, where it looped around the centre of
Kangbashi to cross the Ordos bridge, and out towards Dongsheng –
but for the most part, from this height, Kangbashi looked like a
model city; its radical architecture reduced to novelty
ornaments, its unfinished towers scattered like broken bricks
across a sandpit.

Perhaps the biggest problem that presented itself now, was
deciding on our next destination. We looked about us, turning in
360 degrees to take in the bridge, the high-rises, the city
centre at Genghis Khan Square, the futuristic exhibition centre,
the would-be residential estates fading off row after row into
the desert... and then our eyes fell across the newly-built
Kangbashi sports centre.

The green pitch seemed to glow through the heat haze, the
brightly coloured seating unfolding around it like the petals of
a strange desert orchid. We made a mental note of the direction,
of the landmarks that would lead us – street by street – to the
city's sports ground; and then we made our way back down to the
street.

The Sports Hall

Coming out of the estate and back onto the main road, at first we
retraced our footsteps; back past the hospital, the building
sites and the police station, back in the direction of the
colourful sports grounds.

When we'd passed the police station earlier, we had still been
courting disbelief – trying in vain to process the desolation,
the utter emptiness of Kangbashi. It simply hadn't seemed
possible. Besides, a lifetime's worth of social programming had
told me not to attempt to trespass on what might turn out to be a
live police station.

By now though, we'd passed through the stage of tentative
disbelief, and into one of absolute freedom – the slow-dawning
realisation that virtually everything in Kangbashi was open to be
explored. So, crossing the road to the open gates, we checked the
empty street around us before stepping over the threshold into
the police station's forecourt. It was just as empty as we'd
expected, not a car nor an officer in sight.

We were just ambling across to the main building, when a voice
behind us called out something in Chinese. At first, we
instinctively guessed we'd been caught... but as it turned out
the voice belonged to a caretaker. More than anything else, the
man was simply surprised to see foreign faces here in Ordos.

My companion spoke reasonable Chinese, and so we were able to
have a conversation with the man. He told us he was part of the
maintenance crew, and offered to give us a tour of the place. It
seemed like the novelty of showing visitors around his little
corner of the Ghost City was just too exciting an experience to
pass up. We walked, and our new friend took great pleasure in
pointing out the elaborate features around us – while explaining
how much each one had cost to install.

"Four thousand Quai!" he said, laughing at a large ceramic pot
inlaid with traditional Mongolian figures. That's about £400.

It was clear that this man saw Kangbashi as one colossal folly.
He would quote prices, then wave his arms about at the empty
streets, his gestures doing much to communicate the madness of
such grandiose investment in a ghost town. We followed him
through the station compound, past glass panes that opened onto
empty offices; between the virgin buildings and through to the
rear, where the police station backed onto a school.

A series of colourful sculptures had been placed in one corner of
the yard, apparently united by the theme of apples.
Isaac Newton's face appeared engraved on one giant, metal fruit –
another installation bore the familiar profile of Steve Jobs.

"Ten thousand Quai!" laughed our guide. He seemed to find the
concept of Kangbashi hilarious; although judging from his
clean-cut appearance, his smart and comfortable clothes, the
ghost town nevertheless kept its workers in decent money.

The man led us through a courtyard, around the back of the school
buildings, and suddenly there it was: the yard opened up into a
wide, grassy playing field, flanked on one side by raised
seating.

On the edge of the grass pitch – regularly mowed, yet never used
– we were pointed towards a series of bronze statues. The figures
showed children in traditional Chinese dress, frozen in play as
the pink silk scarves tied about their necks flapped noisily in
the wind.

"Fifty thousand Quai!" the man giggled, ecstatic, before
explaining to us that the silk scarves were washed and replaced
on a weekly basis.

At this point our guide suddenly bid us farewell, explaining that
he had other duties to attend to. He told us to feel welcome
though, and invited us to explore the rest of the facilities. We
assured him we would, before making our way towards the raised
seating and the building underneath.

It was a strange feeling to walk past those rows of plastic seats
and know that none of them had ever been sat on; past the green
grass so neatly marked with white boundary lines and penalty
zones, a well-kept pitch which had never yet known a ball.

A passage opened beneath and between the rows, to lead deep
within the seating block. We followed it through to a pair of
glass doors, marked with a sign reading, 'Young Pioneers Activity
Room'. My friend Gareth, the owner of Young Pioneer Tours, burst into a childish grin as
he posed for a photo beneath. Naturally the door was open (we
were yet to find a single locked door in Ordos), and so we headed
on inside.

The first room we entered, bizarrely, appeared to be a ballet
studio. Light filtered in through pink, silken drapes, to cast
the mirrored walls and polished floors in an almost supernatural
aura of opulence. Next door, a trophy room – shelves lined one
wall in miniature cast figurines, their bases left blank and
ready for inscription.

We wandered from room to room, admiring the facilities. This was
a fully fledged sports centre, ready to open its doors at any
moment. One room held a case of basketballs, all brand new and
with the smell of freshly formed rubber still clinging to them.

The next was a music studio – a computer sat in one corner was
hooked up to a small indoor PA system, complete with microphones
and an eight-track mixing desk. Scattered about the various
tables lay an assortment of trumpets, drums and guitars.

As we explored, I tried to estimate the total value of the items
that lay scattered about the centre: I got into the thousands
before I gave up trying. It was simply baffling to think that
anyone could have walked in from the street, tried any one of the
unlocked doors, and wandered straight inside; exactly as we had
done, in fact. The lack of security around the sports centre –
around Kangbashi as a whole – was like nothing I had ever seen.

But then, there simply wasn't anybody on the streets to
wander straight inside. Kangbashi is so remote, so isolated, that
there seemed to be an general assumption that nobody could be
here without a very good reason. After all, why would thieves and
vandals travel to an empty city in the Ordos Desert?

After the sports ground we headed north, past unfinished statues,
their scaffold still attached, into a hidden courtyard where a
vast monument reared up above us: a silver globe, adorned by a
suspiciously Soviet-esque star. Eventually we emerged onto a main
road, reaching the space-age silver domes of the Kangbashi
Exhibition Centre.

Taking a quick look inside, we stumbled across locals engaged in
fierce pingpong tournaments. I picked up a brochure which touted
Ordos as the 'Brave City of The Future'.

Our last stop was a restaurant: we'd been walking for a full day,
and it was time to refuel. A sign near the exhibition centre
pointed towards a fast food restaurant and we followed it to a
seemingly unfinished building, whose automatic doors nevertheless
sprung open at our approach.

We walked inside to be met by silence. The place was set up ready
for service, tables laid and lights burning bright... but there
was nobody to be seen. Gareth inspected the menu as I ducked
behind the bar, checking out the wide range of beverages on
offer. Amusing as it was to entertain the notion of a free bar,
we were both painfully hungry – and so we resolved to try another
floor.

The lift took us up one level, to an open-plan office: desks and
computers, water coolers and potted plants, but not a sign of
life. We had almost given up by the time we reached the third
floor. The lift doors opened in silence, and then suddenly we
were being welcomed in by a team of uniformed staff. I found
myself wondering how long they had stood on ceremony, waiting
like automatons for a customer to arrive.

Exploring A City of Ghosts

As we waited for our noodles – and after that, the flight back to
Beijing – we reflected on our time in the Ghost City.

Over the course of our 24 hours in Ordos, we had tried every door
within reach – and not one of them had been locked. We'd seen
virtually no one out of uniform, and no sign whatsoever of the
authorities. Even the few security guards we'd met had been so
surprised at the appearance of foreigners, as to have more or
less forgotten their duties. The homes and facilities, meanwhile,
ranged from concrete shells to sheer luxury; and yet, in all that
time we saw nothing with the appearance of having been lived in.

The thing that really got me thinking though, was the sheer size
of the city. If the freedom we'd experienced was anything to go
by, it would take weeks – months, even – to explore the
whole metropolis. Our day had been spent on rooftops, in office
buildings and sports halls... but had we simply picked another
direction, it could just as easily have been factories, colleges
or law courts; churches, mosques, prisons, pools, shopping
centres or train depots.

I've been to ghost towns before, and large ones at that – just
last September I took a tour of Pripyat, for example, in
Ukraine's Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Kangbashi is like nothing
else, however. While perhaps this unfinished city is less
elegant, less historical, less tragic, less decayed or moreover
less photogenic than sites such as Pripyat, the sense of freedom
it offers is unique.

While I'm interested in every aspect of urban exploration, for
me, the emphasis has always been on the exploration
part... and not only is Ordos 200 times larger than the infamous
city of Pripyat, but it is virtually unknown to foreigners. For
an urban explorer then, Ordos is a vast, alien playground that
offers nothing but discovery.